Moody Puts Aviation On A Religious Plane

July 28, 1997|By Steve Kloehn, Tribune Religion Writer.

The pilot somehow managed to put the wheeled plane down in the water, and scrambled out before the plane sank to the bottom. The plane was fished out and flying two days later. But the lesson was indelible.

At Moody Aviation, one is more likely to hear that kind of cautionary tale than any rhapsody about soaring through the clouds.

What does fire up otherwise mild-mannered pilots at Moody Aviation is a suggestion that their work may be obsolete or, worse, wrong.

"You hear all this stuff in the media and in educational circles about what wonderful lives these (native) people would have if we would just leave them alone," said flight instructor Dan Gleason, who spent four years flying on the Philippine island of Mindanao before joining the Moody faculty.

"That's simply false," Gleason said. "They die of chicken pox. They live in fear and bondage to the spirits."

Robinson, the son of Moody Aviation founder Paul Robinson, agrees.

"When anthropologists and other people come along and say, `They're happy. Why don't you leave them alone?' I have all I can do to keep from saying, `Friend, you don't know what you're talking about,' " said Robinson.

Just outside Moody Aviation's radio room, a wall-size map of the world bristles with push pins. Each marks a spot where a Moody alumnus now works--Mali, Madagascar, Moscow, Ecuador, Edmonton and Ethiopia, to name a few.

In dozens of agencies around the world, hundreds of missionary pilots fly food and medicine in after disasters, transport sick and injured villagers to distant hospitals, or ferry government officials into their own hinterlands. If the subject of salvation comes up en route, all the better.

Though Moody officials don't talk much about it, a few of their graduates even work as covert missionaries. Some countries will not issue a visa to a Christian preacher but will allow entry by a working pilot or mechanic. The pilot then plies his trade in the secular world, keeping an eye out for opportunities to comfort ostracized Christians or spread the faith, usually one person at a time.

Aviation, however, was not originally seen as a cover, but as a breakthrough tool for getting out the word of the Lord.

In the years immediately before and after World War II, as small aircraft became less expensive and more reliable, a handful of missionary-minded evangelicals began to recognize the profound impact aviation could have on their work.

One of them was Paul Robinson, the late father of Ed. Paul, a Baptist minister and pilot, was too old to serve in overseas missions by the time the war ended. But in 1946, he went to his alma mater, Moody Bible Institute, and pitched the idea of adding an aviation curriculum to the school's already prominent missionary studies program.

Within a year, Moody Aviation's first Piper Cub was taking off from the grass field at what was then the west suburban Elmhurst Municipal Airport. When Elmhurst closed, Robinson--now director of the program--led Moody to buy what was then Wood Dale Airport.

And when the crush of air traffic from nearby O'Hare made Wood Dale a less-than-ideal place to teach beginners, Robinson persuaded Moody to sell the vastly appreciated land at Wood Dale and use the proceeds to build a new Moody Aviation site from the ground up, with classrooms, offices, machine shops and hangars.

The ideal site would be away from commercial aviation, preferably in terrain that more closely approximated what missionary pilots would face in the field--few missions, after all, serve prairies.

Robinson chose Elizabethton, a struggling mill town in the Appalachian mountains of far northeastern Tennessee.

Through a government program, Elizabethton had just built a new municipal airport, but it was having trouble finding people interested in using it. When Moody officials visited in 1968, they were given a two-car police escort through town.

Moody Aviation built its new complex there and officially opened it in 1970. By that time, Paul Robinson and his wife already had two children serving in the missionary field. A third, Ed, was studying to be a professor of Bible studies.

But when spring flooding in the basement of the Robinson home in Itasca destroyed all of Ed Robinson's research for his thesis, his father gently suggested once again that Ed try "flight camp," the week of evaluation at Moody Aviation.

Ed discovered not only that he was relieved to have escaped the life of books and classrooms, but that he was good at flying. Not that he was much more enthusiastic about flying than he had been growing up.

"It was all-the-time, stinking hard work," Ed remembered of his days as a Moody Aviation student.

A quarter-century later, Robinson's students vouch they are getting the same experience with Robinson as the school's new director.

Eight thousand feet above Tennessee's rolling hills, Tim Vennell, a recent graduate of Moody Aviation, recalled his training, looking back at his passengers with a grin.

"Your brain is so busy doing it, you don't get to enjoy it," Vennell said.

In the seat next to him, flight instructor Al Rice gently pointed out that while Vennell was answering questions, the Cessna 185--the quintessential, tail-wheel, missionary plane--had begun to weave ever so slightly through the air.